Separator (3 horizontal lines) don't match the 3D Background

@Dan: you approved the current design. ;-)

I thought it looks kind of weird, too. It's like the perspective between the separators and the dock is totally inconsistent.

yeah that's what I meant. I don't think it's too much work to get them right.

Would the separators look better if they were made taller and increased in width more towards the bottom? I kind of wish I knew how to make a mockup of what I'm thinking.

I'm not an expart in design. Buy I think the main problem isn't the width but that they are too concentrated near the bottom. And that they don't become smaller (vertically not horizontally) further in the dock.

In my opinion it should look more or less like this:

http://yfrog.com/2oscreenshotnkp

but I'm sure anyone can come up with a better design.

This mockup is what i had in mind. I will play with it.

That mockup looks much better than what we have now in my opinion, but I'm still slightly bothered by it. Both the mockup and the current design have the bottom two lines being the same width, and I think that is also detracting from a proper 3D look. The same kind of goes for the top two lines in the mockup, but it's much more noticeable in the bottom two.

Attached is a somewhat cruddy mockup I made (I just took a screenshot of Docky and did some quick GIMP editing to it...I'm no pro, either). But in this one, you can see how the lines gradually increase in width towards the "front" of the dock. Ideally, the amount by which they do so should be similar to the slope of the sides of the dock to make a good 3D effect, in my opinion.

Yeah, I like it. I think that separator would actually be a dramatic design change for the better.

So I decided to take a shot at a new seperator using WarriorIng64 mockup and apples Dock for inspiration. After working on it for some time I could really use some feedback, let me know what you think.

Attached is a sceenshot of what I got now. Feel free to download by branching my ui-improve branch: lp:~mathijshenquet/docky/ui-improve to see it in action.

The attached screenshot looks great! Too bad I've never compiled a package from source though, and only have a general idea of how you go about that. But I wouldn't mind waiting to see that change appear in an update.

@Mathijs: Thanks for the work. Two comments. First, it appears some of the lines are very fuzzy, usually this means they aren't properly aligned (you can fix by moving it 0.5 pixels). Second, it goes 'too far back' or 'too close to the top' of the dock. The second problem is one that you probably can't fix, for rather technical reasons I don't care to get into.

We plan on changing quite a bit so that the 2nd problem isn't there and most likely it will wind up looking similar to what you have.

@Robert On your first comment. I know about the .5 hack but i doulb it's going to work. It uses a algorithm to determine line thickness which produces doubles, so after adding .5 you still wont get sharp lines. The only place where it might have effect is the first and last line so I added it anyway.

About your second comment, I actually used a dirty hack to get the separator to go that high (height = height * 1.3). When finding out where that height value actually came from I turned out that, as you described, there are more problems with that height value.

The problem is there are (at least) 3 possible dock heights. When we added in 3d docks, we hacked in something to try and estimate the 3d dock height and dock items get the 'actual' height. Unfortunately this is not at all accurate and fails for things like 3d+panel or 2d+panel.

Anyway we have to redo this, and we are aware of it. Until that happens though, it is pretty much impossible to get the separator looking exactly how we want.

I saw your hack and tweaked around, it now actually looks quite decent. I know this isn't a permanent solution but I thought since there is a hack in place atm i might as well improve it.

Screenshots of the separator at various sizes an panel/no-panel can be viewed at http://imgur.com/J7XKk&LlH1Xl&hSUYu&iUj9X&MfkbQ?full

@Robert, As you can see the panel ones have the correct height but to much lines. Is there a way to access the preferences from within the separator?

I just pushed a new version with two separator styles, one has apple like borders the other with rounded borders as in my previous examples. To toggle the styles change the gconf-setting /apps/docky-2/Docky/Items/SeparatorItem/SeparatorStyle from 0 to 1.

The only issues left are to detect panel mode, and a way to make the separator better visible with a light docky theme.

I would *highly* recommend not spending any more time on this. We have several branches going that will probably make this invalid.

It would be sad if this wasn't taken care of. There is too many people that choose a dock only by how it looks and people that want a mac like dock can easily spot the problem.

Maybe it could be left for a further away milestone

I noticed that the separator lines were spaced out a bit vertically in Docky 2.0.7 bzr r1369 pre-release, so it looks slightly better now but still not perfect. It's comparable to what is in the mockup in comment #5, but with one less line, and the horizontal proportions of the lines still don't look right in relation to the edges of the dock. What Mathis Henquet has in his branch isn't completely perfect either, but it's superb in my opinion to what is currently out now. I'd recommend anyone looking for an early temporary fix to use that until something is "officially" done about this.

Anything official will have to come from the themes branch, since that changes so much of the drawing code.

My changes have been modified for the themes branch, related branch: lp:~mathijshenquet/docky/themes-3d-separator